Experiment with my new lighting kit and a Coalport figurine.
Author: Ali
Atom Smashing
There was a time when the smallest possible particle was dust, from which we were raised and to which we would return. Dust that could be kneaded and moulded to make man, briefly, but in the end worms and disintegration would win. Dust to dust.
Then we learned of the atom, but the order of the world was not disturbed, for what was an atom but a smaller, harder, more perfect grain? A finer mill, a more persistent miller, patient and relentless, but we knew it was just grist. We understood what it was to be atomistic. Alone, unaffected, hard surfaces that could collide, but never crack.
How then should we measure the cracking of the atom on the scale of human suffering? The point at which the freedom of armour was replaced by the imprisoning fear that it could be breached. The terror of collision that could bind two atoms together in such an explosive incident that something new would be created, another atom, more dense, solid, permanent, and yet discarding energy like sweat from a bailaora.
And more devastating still: the knowledge they could be ripped apart with the fury of Armageddon. What God has united let no man tear asunder, and yet we could. If all that would be left behind was devastation, a horror of wind and winter as a new dust, thick and toxic choked the life out of the earth, what did it matter? We had the power to bring about the end of all things.
The days of dust, of marbles that bounce off one another and roll away unmarked, are gone. We have learned of binding and breaking; it cannot be unlearned. Deadly decisions as simple as a coin flip, but no one has taught us how to choose, or if we have to make a choice at all
End
My book available here and here among others. Buy it, review it, tell me what you think.
DP: Numbers. Nil Flagrante
Fire Dancer. Malaysia 2012.
It was raining heavily, and getting this right without tripod and flicking the camera up and down to stop raindrops on the lens was pretty tricky.
Daily Prompt was for photographers to show numbers.
DP: Choice – The Choice that is No Choice
Daily Prompt today is to choose a location to be kidnapped to: desert island, jungle or locked in a building.
The Choice that is No Choice
“It is a simple enough decision. Why hesitate?”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t quite trust your intentions.”
My captor smiled. At least I assumed he smiled. Something in the shape of the silhouette, which had barely moved throughout our conversation, seemed a bit more smiley.
“I bear you no personal ill will,” he said, “I have just been asked to keep you out of the way for a while. Once things have taken their course we will come and get you and you can go.”
I had already made my decision, it was pretty straightforward. Either to be abandoned on a desert island, or locked in a building, which would trigger my acute claustrophobia; or to be left in a jungle, with my creepy crawly phobia. It was a no brainer. Blessed solitude, time to work on my tan, if they gave me paper and enough pencils I would be happy if they never came back, swimming, catching fish. It would be Survivor and Desert Island Discs rolled into one.
The choice wasn’t about my choice of destination, it was whether I chose to trust someone I could not see, who had had me bundled into a blacked out X5 outside Henrietta’s house, and brought here. Wherever here was.
I remembered the bunta joke and began to laugh. Quietly at first, a little hiccoughing giggle, that gained momentum until I was bubbling over with hysterical snorts. I don’t have a particularly attractive or cool laugh, and once it escapes I can’t haul it back. Now, with the wire tight tension it grabbed me and launched me off the cliff face of clownery.
“You find something amusing in the situation?”
It took a while to get my breath under control. “You just reminded me of a joke about choices, and under the circumstances I found it funnier than it really is.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s really not that good.”
“We have a little time until your transportation gets here. Indulge me.”
I shrugged, “You asked for it. There are three explorers deep in Africa, who are captured by a tribe, and tried by the chief for trespassing on his territory. They were found guilty, and the chief offered them a choice: death, or a punishment he called bunta.”
There was no sign from the silhouette to suggest he had heard the joke before, so I ploughed on. “Fearing death the first explorer says, “I choose bunta.” The chief smiles cruelly and the man is dragged off into a hut. His friends hear fearful screams for about 20 minutes, and then the guy emerges, naked, limping, haggard, his eyes empty and his cheeks hollow. He grabs the next guy by the hand and says, “Choose death, there is nothing more terrible than bunta”. Then he falls unconscious to the floor.”
Still nothing from the silhouette. “The second guy also fears dying, and also chooses bunta, despite the warning. An lo and behold 20 minutes later he is out as well, naked, limping and broken. “Choose death” he begs his friend, “choose death.” And with that he passes out too.
“Now with two testimonies in hand the third guy is resigned to his fate. “I choose death,” he says. The chief smiles again and says “Good. Death by bunta.”
Nothing. Not a snigger, not a snort, not even a groan. This must be how a comedian feels when his material falls flat, although it was never really a very good joke. It took a while before he said, “I see. The choice that is no choice. You fear perhaps that there is a building in a jungle on a deserted island?”
I suddenly went cold, and a stinking sweat broke out all over. “Say that last bit again.”
“You fear a building in a jungle on a deserted island.”
“I thought it was a desert island.”
“Not at all, it is just far from any shipping lanes, and there is no human habitation. The island is off the coast of Finland, but too far to swim for shore.”
I should expand on the things I don’t like, enclosed spaces, bugs, and being cold.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because I am being well paid for it. You need to be kept well out of the way until Lady Henrietta is married, and when she is safely away on honeymoon, you can come back.” I definitely heard the smile in the voice this time. “His Lordship thought an object lesson might be in order, so you could reflect on your behaviour. Lady Henrietta has so much to say about you in her diary, and I am always thorough in my research.”
So that was it. My shoulders slumped in resignation. “Tell me about this building.”
End
My book available here and here among others. Buy it, review it, tell me what you think.
The photo above is one of my own, taken from a seaplane over the Maldives.
Kafka Elliott
Cold Steel by Kate Elliott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I rarely abandon a book, especially if I have been engaged by its predecessors in a series. And lord knows I was impatient for the release of this final installment of the Spiritwalker series.
Cold Steel was a high four, pushing a five. Cold Magic was a low four, but still had momentum, but by Cold Steel the fire has gone out.
It feels as though Kate Elliot fell out of love with what made her characters feisty and interesting in the first book, and that allowed us to forgive the danger signs in the character development in the second.
By Cold Steel the momentum has gone, as if two books burned away the freshness and energy, and in its place the author propped up the story telling with romantic filler and gratuitous sex.
The main character Cat descends from someone vital and potent to a sap obsessed with her husband’s body and laundry.
And because the characters have paled, suddenly the unusual cadence of their speech becomes annoying. I don’t need everyone to be constantly called by their full names and honorifics. And its a jacket, so why always call it a dash jacket and clutter up the prose, and frankly i don’t give a crap about the attire anyway, so why mention it at all…
And that is why I gave up. If the plot had been condensed into two books, rather than three, and the prose tightened and stripped, this would have been a stand out series. Which leads us to look with eyes narrowed at the money men at the publishers.
Unless, perhaps, I have missed the point and in the end this is a morality tale. However exciting or different, or intriguing something is at the beginning, it is destined to fade into a humdrum existence of petty distractions, small events and hollow victories.
My book available here and here among others. Buy it, review it, tell me what you think.
DP: Singular Sensation
On the Foreshore
On the Foreshore – A Romance
Boulder: So tarnished am I, and unlike the head of pin, I had not thought my scabrous skin would feel the feel of feet so thin and pale. Or that a dancing tap could beat a counterpoint to the constant slap and wipe of waves. And yet, here worn by a hundred hundred years am I, the stage for your long residence. Platform and prayer mat for worship. Angel, let slip the secret now, why do you not flap your wings that barely cast a shadow? Leap from cloud to heaven, vault the stars and seek a theatre where one such as you could earn applause, and honours from the stellar notaries?
Angel: La. You say such things my weathered rock, touchstone of my thoughts; and no grand angel I. For sure I have the wings and grace, but lowly in the order of the Lord am I, and you, boulder, should be bolder still. For you have bent the waves to match your will, they break and soak, but you, stage of my exultation do not move. Yes, yes, hells fire yes, I am the object of some others lust. The winds and every errant breeze would take me, fleeting, flitting for the joy of my soft limbs, but you stone are the anchor, tether that will hold me when the jealous gusts rise up in all their fury, rouse their sister in the Sea to hold me. You, profound and silicate secure me from the tempest of my suitors and their spite.
Boulder: Minnows paddle furious, within my steeping hollows, and the crabs crawl over me unlicensed, intimate. Each day the sea suborns the sand to wear my deadened skin, and I can feel my granite growing thin. And yet, blind I can sense your steps, the whisper of your dancing. My weight, immensity anchored into bedrock is uplifted to the kissing breath of starlight when your footsteps fall on me. I, clod, hardened by the pressured furnace, drink from the cup of nebulae when you hurl yourself in dance.
Angel: Then dance we both, dear stone, son of the earth herself. Dance we, for your stillness is the gorgeous certainty, and my movement draws you closer to the Lord. Dance we both until the stinging sea has scrubbed you to a pebble, bled on by my blisters, and the clutching hands of winds have torn my wings from me. Then with my dying breath I will swallow you entire, and scorn the lascivious breezy hands and say, “Fie! Feel my ire, for I live in my love, and he lives on in me.”
End
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Window – from the spa
View of Andaman Bay from the Spa at the Andaman Hotel, Langkawi. Love the place, and the memories. A set of doors open on to a wide balcony, and after your body has been massaged, your eyes see this. I didn’t lug any cameras up there, so this was taken on my crappy old Samsung Apollo.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Window
The theme for the week is Window.
There is an odd duplication in photographing through a window, as the viewfinder constrains the breadth and scope that can be captured, and a window compresses this further.
This is taken from Southwark Bridge, there are concrete port holes at chin height all along the bridge. They pre date most of the redevelopment of London, both on the north and south banks, and so whether you see empty sky or an interesting vista is a matter of chance.
The Plath Maths Patois
“…today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart”
In a fit of Plath love I posted a snippet from “Love is a Parallax” as a facebook status update. It kicked off an interesting conversation, conducted in a patois of poetry and maths, that I think is worth sharing, and also inviting views of the literate in both matters of the heart and pure mathematics.
Plath posits that there is a “simple sum of heart plus heart”. Reduced in its simplest form to the heart being something that can be added to another to lead to a defined outcome, and one that we may assume from her direction is qualitatively better than the component parts.
My interlocutor was in the Plath camp. Hearts are simple, and the mechanism that causes them to be combined is simple (let’s call it love for now) and leads to a defined outcome of fulfilment for both hearts.
My contention was that hearts are potentially complex, and the equation is not one of heart plus heart, but of finding where heart equals heart.
For the mathematically literate:
Plath: H1+H2 = goodness; where H1 is the heart of one person, and H2 the heart of another.
Me: fn(H1) = gn(H2), where the function that describes the characteristics of Heart 1 over n variables coincides with the function that governs the characteristics of Heart 2; which may be a number of outcomes which for now we can label good or bad, but which we will need to come back to later.
In fact, one may be choosing between the feasible set of outcomes for fn(H1) = gn(H2) and fn(H1) = hn(H2), and therefore in a love triangle, which partner to choose.
If the maths has lost you, think of a simple 2 axis chart, where the horizontal axis is passion, and the vertical axis is loyalty (I chose those at random). In a Plath world someone who scores 2 in passion and 2 in loyalty, joining with someone who scores 3 in passion and 1 in Loyalty leads to a partnership that scores 5 in passion and 3 in loyalty.
In comparison, I am saying that hearts are not points on that chart, they are potentially lines or even an area, and what we are really looking for is the set of results for where those points / lines / areas overlap.
Which leads to what I think is an interesting question. What are the n characteristics by which one may define a heart? I have crudely chosen passion and loyalty to illustrate the theory, but they may be irrelevant. The determinants may be something else entirely, cubic capacity perhaps, or susceptibility to chemical interference. Heart in this instance may indeed not be the muscle in the chest, but the complex group of brain parts that govern emotions and attachments.
Once we know what we think the n characteristics are what is the feasible set of values these characteristics could take? Are some binary: a person is or is not an arsehole. Are some potentially drawn from the full array of real and imaginary numbers?
When we have locked down the dimensions and their feasible sets, what form do we think the equation would take, and in solving it, do we expect to find a single point for each heart – essentially bringing us back to the simplicity of a Plath world, or a complex solution set that may or may not be continuous?
Finally, in comparing and combining two heart functions, are we in fact looking for their sum (per Plath) or where they coincide, and if there are multiple answers to the sum, or solution to the equations, on what basis could or should we choose between the results we get?
So, there is the tee up. Is the sum of heart plus heart simple, or are we looking at something infinitely more complicated?
Ali Abbas 